Hilda Lessways by Arnold Bennett (reading fiction txt) 📖

up with him in the close intimacy of the compartment. She was glad that he did not apologize to her for his lack of restraint, nor foolishly pretend that he was boring her.

"It does seem a shame!" she murmured, her eyes candidly admitting that she felt enormously flattered.

He sighed and laughed. "How often have I heard my father say that--'_Ce sont des barbares_!' Peels only brought him over because they could find nobody in the Five Towns civilized enough to do the work that he did.... I can imagine how he must have felt when he first came here!... My God!... Environment!... I tell you what--it's only lately I've realized how I loathe the provinces!"

The little interior in which they were, swept steadily and smoothly across the central sunlit plain of England, passing canals and brooks and cottages and churches--silent and stolid in that English stupidity that he was criticizing. And Hilda saw of George Cannon all that was French in him. She saw him quite anew, as something rather exotic and entirely marvellous. She thought: "When I first met him, I said to myself he was a most extraordinary man. And I was right. I was more right than I ever imagined. No one down there has any idea of what he really is. They're too stupid, as he says."

He imposed on her his scorn of the provincial. She had to share it. She had a vision of the Five Towns as a smoky blotch on the remote horizon,--negligible, crass, ridiculous in its heavy self-complacency. The very Orgreaves themselves were tinged with this odious English provincialism.

He smiled to himself, and then said, very quietly: "It isn't of the least importance, you know. In fact I'm rather glad. I've never had any difficulty in making money, and when I've settled up everything down there I shan't be precisely without. And I shall have no excuse for not branching out in a new line."

She meekly encouraged him to continue.

"Oh yes!" he went on. "The law isn't the only thing--not by a long way. And besides, I'm sick of it. Do you know what the great thing of the future is, I mean the really great thing--the smashing big thing?" He smiled, kindly and confidential.

She too smiled, shaking her head.

"Well, I'll tell you. Hotels!"

"Hotels?" She was perfectly nonplussed.

"Hotels! There'll be more money and more fun to be got out of hotels, soon, than out of any other kind of enterprise in the world. You should see those hotels that are going up in London! They'd give you a start, and no mistake! Yes, hotels! There aren't twenty people in England who know what a hotel is! But I know!" He paused, and added reflectively, in a comically naive tone: "Curious how these things come to you, bit by bit! Now, if it hadn't been for Sarah--and that boarding-house--"

He was using his straw hat as a fan. With an unexpected and almost childlike gesture he suddenly threw the hat up on to the rack above his head, "How's that?"

"What a boy he is, after all!" thought Hilda sympathetically, wondering why in the midst of all her manifold astonishment she felt so light-hearted and gay.

"Funny parcel you've got up there!" he idly observed, glancing from one rack to the other.

The parcel contained Mrs. Orgreave's generous conception of a repast proper to be eaten in a train in place of high tea. He helped her to eat it.

As the train approached London he resumed his manhood. And he was impeccably adult as he conducted her from Euston to King's Cross, and put her into a train in a corner of the station that the summer twilight had already taken possession of.


III


Late at night Hilda sat with Sarah Gailey in the landlady's small bedroom at the Cedars. It was lighted by a lamp, because the builder of the house, hating excess, had thought fit not to carry gas-pipes higher than the first floor. A large but old bedstead filled half the floor space. On the shabby dressing-table a pile of bills and various papers lay near the lamp. Clothes were hung behind the door, and a vague wisp of muslin moved slightly in the warm draught from the tiny open window. There were two small cane-chairs, enamelled, on which the women sat, close to each other, both incommoded by the unwholesome sultriness of the only chamber that could be spared for the private use of the house-mistress. This small bedroom was Sarah Gailey's home; its amenities were the ultimate nightly reward of her labours. If George Cannon had obtained possession of the Cedars as an occupation for Sarah, this room and Sarah's pleasure therein were the sole justification of the entire mansion.

As Hilda looked at Sarah Gailey's bowed head, but little greyed, beneath the ray of the lamp, and at her shrivelled, neurotic, plaintive face in shadow, and at her knotty hands loosely clasped, she contrasted her companion and the scene with the youthfulness and the spaciousness and the sturdy gay vigour of existence in the household of the Orgreaves. She thought, with a renewed sense of the mysterious strangeness of life: "Last night I was there, far away--all those scores of miles of fields and towns are between!--and to-night I am here. Down there I was nothing but an idler. Here I am the strongest. I am indispensable. I am the one person on whom she depends. Without me everything will go to pieces." And she thought of George Cannon's vast enigmatic projects concerning grand hotels. In passing the immense pile of St. Pancras on the way from Euston to King's Cross, George Cannon had waved his hand and said: "Look at that! Look at that! It's something after that style that I want for a toy! And I'll have it!" Yes, the lofty turrets of St. Pancras had not intimidated him. He, fresh from little Turnhill and from defeats, could rise at once to the height of them, and by the force of imagination make them his own! He could turn abruptly from the law--to hotels! A disconcerting man! And the mere tone in which he mentioned his enterprise seemed, in a most surprising way, to dignify hotels, and even boarding-houses; to give romance to the perfectly unromantic business of lodging and catering!... And the seed from which he was to grow the magic plant sat in the room there with Hilda: that bowed head! The ambition and the dream resembled St. Pancras: the present reality was the Cedars, and Sarah's poor, stuffy little bedroom in the Cedars.

Sarah began to cry, weakly.

"But what's the matter?" asked Hilda, the strong succourer.

"Nothing. Only it's such a relief to me you've come."

Hilda deprecated lightly. "I should have come sooner if I'd known. You ought to have sent word before."

"No, I couldn't. After all, what is it? I'm only silly. There's nothing really the matter. The minute you come I can see that. I can even stand those Boutwoods if you're here. You know George made it up with them; and I won't say he wasn't right. But I had to put my pride in my pocket. And yesterday it nearly made me scream out to see Mrs. Boutwood stir her tea."

"But why?"

"I don't know. It's nerves, that's what it is.... Well, I've got to go through these." She fingered the papers on the dressing-table with her left hand while drying her tears with the right. "He's very wishful for proper accounts, George is. That's right enough. But--well--I think I can make a shilling go as far as anyone, and choose flesh-meat with anyone, too--that I will say--but these accounts...! George is always wanting to know how much it costs a head a week for this that and the other.... It's all very well for him, but if he had the servants to look after and--"

"I'm going to keep your accounts for you," Hilda soothed her.

"But--"

"I'm going to keep your accounts for you," And she thought: "How exactly like mother I was just then!"

It appeared to Hilda that she was making a promise, and shouldering a responsibility, against her will, and perhaps against her common sense. She might keep accounts at the Cedars for a week, a fortnight, a month. But she could not keep accounts there indefinitely. She was sowing complications for herself. Freedom and change and luxury were what she deemed she desired; not a desk in a boarding-house. And yet something within her compelled her to say in a firm, sure, kindly voice:

"Now give me all those papers, Miss Gailey."

And amid indefinite regret and foreboding, she was proud and happy in her role of benefactor.

When Hilda at length rose to go to her own room, Sarah Gailey had to move her chair so that she might pass. At the door both hesitated for an instant, and then Hilda with a sudden gesture advanced her lips. It was the first time she and Sarah had ever kissed. The contact with that desiccated skin intensified to an extraordinary degree Hilda's emotional sympathy for the ageing woman. She thought, poignantly: "Poor old thing!"

And when she was on the dark little square landing under the roof, Sarah, holding the lamp, called out in a whisper.

"Hilda!"

"Well?"

"Did he say anything to you about Brighton?"

"Brighton?" She perceived with certainty from Sarah's eager and yet apologetic tone, that the question had been waiting for utterance throughout the evening, and that Sarah had lacked courage for it until the kiss had enheartened her. And also she perceived that Sarah was suspecting her of being somehow in conspiracy with George Cannon.

"Yes," said Sarah. "He's got into his head that Brighton's the only place for this boarding-house business if it's to be properly done."

"He never said a word to me about Brighton," Hilda whispered positively.

"Oh!"

Hilda descended the stairs, groping. Brighton? What next?



CHAPTER III AT BRIGHTON

I


She thought vividly, one afternoon about three months later, of that final scrap of conversation. Just as she had sat opposite George Cannon in a second-class compartment, so now she was sitting opposite Sarah Gailey in a second-class compartment. The train, having passed Lewes, was within a few minutes of Brighton. And following behind them, somewhere at the tail of the train, were certain trunks containing all that she possessed and all that Sarah Gailey possessed of personal property--their sole chattels and paraphernalia on earth. George Cannon had willed it and brought it about. He was to receive them on the platform of Brighton Station. She had not seen very much of him in the interval, for he had been continually on the move between Brighton and Turnhill. "In a moment we shall all be together again," she reflected. "This meeting also will happen, as everything else has happened, and a new period will definitely have begun." And she sat and stared at the closed eyes of the desiccated Sarah Gailey, and waited for the instant of arrival apprehensively and as it were incredulously--not with fear, not with pleasure, but with the foreboding of adventure and a curious idea that the instant of arrival never would come.

For thirteen weeks, which had gone very quickly, she had devoted herself to Sarah Gailey, acting as George Cannon's precursor, prophet, and expounder. While the summer cooled into autumn, and the boarding-house season slackened and once more feebly brightened, she had daily conversed with Sarah about George's plans, making them palatable to her, softening the shocks of them,